The research partnership between the Legal Innovation Centre and A&O Shearman represents 8 years of R&D collaboration. The Legal Innovation Centre acts as a Centre of Excellence promoting research innovation in legal services provision and access to justice.
- Embedded research — working directly with lawyers to deliver better solutions
- Horizon scanning and thought leadership
- Evaluating and adopting next-generation technology
- Future-proofing A&O Shearman
Research Strategy Panel
The role of the Research Strategy Panel includes:
- Research project ideation
- Ongoing development of the AOS–UU Research & Development plan
- Ensuring that research projects reflect A&O Shearman’s micro and macro business environment goals and needs
- Tracking delivery of research goals
Horizon Scanning & AI Strategy Planning
Ulster University and the A&O Shearman Data Science Team are engaged in a Thought Leadership programme for new developments in the AI and technology landscape. This programme works on the ongoing identification, explanation, and assessment of emergent technologies:
- What is this technology and what are its most recent developments?
- How could this technology be applied to the different business processes within A&O Shearman?
- What opportunities does this technology present for A&O Shearman?
- What are the challenges and risks in realising these opportunities?
- How is research activity in this technology changing?
- What impact will this research have within industry in the coming months/years?
The outcomes of this programme include:
- Regular contributions to the DS & AI channel
- Regular opinion pieces on the A&O Shearman intranet portal
- Articles in external legal and legal-tech industry publications and sites
- Regular A&O Shearman-branded blog posts on the Legal innovation Centre blog site
- Future Disputes Group Advice & Planning
- Cyber Security Team Updates
The Team
Dr Niall McCarroll
Dr Niall McCarroll is a Senior Research Fellow at Ulster University’s Intelligent Systems Research Centre and is the Director of the Legal Innovation Centre.
Launched in 2016, the Legal Innovation Centre provides education and training to equip law students and legal professionals with the tools to become active innovators in the legal service market, as well as engaging in collaborative research and development for industry clients, the public sector, and the academic community, to explore how innovation can improve legal service delivery and access to justice.
Niall’s ongoing applied research work includes a seven-year collaboration with Allen & Overy (now A&O Shearman). Working alongside an experienced Data Science team, Niall focuses on the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and state-of-the-art Machine Learning techniques to achieve more efficient ways of consuming unstructured legal text data for the automation of contract review, document processing, and legal analysis.
Dr Sujata Rani
Dr Sujata Rani is a Research Associate at Ulster University’s School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems. As a researcher, Sujata has over 7 years’ experience in the NLP domain.
She has worked on sentiment analysis, deepfake media identification, and hate speech detection. Prior to joining Ulster University, Sujata was working as a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, India. She has been instrumental in guiding several undergraduate and masters NLP projects.
Sujata’s research focuses on applying NLP techniques to multimodal data in different domains to gain useful insights in information retrieval. She also has hands-on experience in applying NLP techniques within the legal domain. Sujata’s research work over the past years has resulted in a number of quality publications in high-indexed SCI/SCIE/SSCI journals and presentations at international conferences.